Uberseehandel

The XPS 15 is pretty good too, and a black Aero-15 would be discrete. You certainly have some good suggestions - I'll check with SolidWorks as to whether these two have been tested for compatibility.

SolidWorks can be quite particular as far as drivers go, and the interaction with the underlying hardware. Price is less important than capability.

As I indicated above, I like the idea of the Surface Book, but the reality is that it is under powered and over priced. An old-spec core-lite CPU, no T3 port, and the SSD is retro-chic. Perhaps by the next gig, there will be a better specification Surface Book.

I'd considered remoting for when I am not at the test site and the IOT kit needs updating, on the fly. But given that the test site is a charming old French port on the Mediterranean, I suspect I'll be there, quite a lot. At the end of my involvement in the project, I expect to hand the development workstation onto one of the staff development engineers.

That does look to be a very suitable option, I'll go to the nearest proper computer store later this week and look at the difference between 15" and 17" laptop screens. Personally, I find it more comfortable to have bigger screens and less extreme spectacles, than the other way round. This is one of the realities of a life spent in Information Systems, one ends up with stuffed eyesight, really the long days are the problem. If I can live with the 15" screen, that would be a plus. My 13 inch screen laptop screen is definitely too small these days. Although I am the best part of a 1,000 miles away from the test site, both it and home are on high speed rail links, so I would choose to travel between sites by rail and the 15" would be far better for that.

Guys I've just picked up an exciting new gig designing, developing and implementing the autonomous ride/flight height control system for a zero-emissions foiling water taxi, and marine services craft. Fortunately, I'm working with a friend who is a naval architect (designs boats) and hydrodynamicist (how fluids flow round aerofoil surfaces and structures), as part of the overall development team, its quite a big deal. This will involve a lot of travel so I need a portable workstation. What will I be running? Solid Works (the whole enchilada) Visual Studio with all the IOT stuff (Node Red, Arduino IDE, Eclipse etc), telemetry logging, MQTT, Android/IOS app development, Cloud hosted services, MongoDB, Pentaho, R and related stuff. Office plus Project plus Visio. Various bits of discrete comms software. So lots of software tools, many hosted out of Visual Sudio, if only for overall project simplicity. I'm addicted to big 4K second monitors and would live with a 17" laptop as well. I don't think I'll be travelling with the big second screen, but I will take my proper mouse and keyboard (Bluetooth) and get the project to buy extra monitors at the development/testing site. Buying TVs as monitors is problematic, some are OK, most are not. So lots of memory, SolidWorks friendly graphics, probably 500 MB+ NVME M2 SSD. I like the idea of the Surface Book, but not the reality/specification. I don't think I need a touch screen (I'm not designing the foils or control surfaces, just the controls). And whatever I get, it must be discrete. I know some of the games laptops make excellent workstations. All suggestions considered, I'd be most grateful for a steer in the right direction.

This is what I hope is helpful feedback. I watched the WAN show on a HDR 4K Smart TV, with decent external sound. Immediately I could see that the WAN show was "brighter" (more poppy), and Luke and Linus appeared to be a lot paler than their normal shade of nerd. Unfortunately, the sound mostly came across as lacking in base and mid-range, quite possibly the YouTube soundtrack was not complete. The title music was there, just, but needs some more love to make it bearable. Surprisingly, there was virtually continuous blurring around the mouths and, if the head was turning and hair was out of place, that blurred too. This surprised me. Finally, as you get everything working properly, things that one never noticed previously become very obvious. Such as too many bits and pieces on the microphone. None of the above is a criticism, I do enjoy watching the WAN show, and look forward to seeing how it develops this year.

I agree

I watched Luke's recent video comparing the two processors. For me, the timing was good. My requirements have nothing to do with game play (or over clocking). I am an Information Systems designer and implementer and a project director. As a matter of convenience I use a pair of 42-inch Sony 4K monitors, which are HDR compatible, and much better at being monitors than most similar products. Quite often I am running projects that involve placing large BI screens in control rooms/network centres, so the big screens make sense at several levels. I have been considering using a maxed out Intel Skull Canyon as a replacement desktop processor, with 32GB and 1TB Samsung 960 Pro SSD, it should eat most tasks with room enough for me to spin up some virtual machines. Surprisingly, the 2D data modelling software can get quite demanding compute-wise, there are a lot of objects to pan. Some of the time I will use the monitors to view a 4K movie, or television programme. And herein lies my dilemma. 10-bit HDR 4K is more likely to be less problematic on a Kaby Lake i7 than the SkyLake equivalent. I'm inclined to wait for the new chip for the easier video capability, or am I mistaken? Which ever I get, it will eventually end up bolted on the back of a TV as a HTPC, so the video smarts look worth holding out for.